01:19 am - One Big Happy Dysfunctional FamilyIf you don't like me, you can suck it. The end.

Tonight's BSG? So much better than last week's. Hell, I didn't even notice Cally and Tyrol were missing.

Let me get the bad out of the way first. It was irritating to listen to all the people arguing about whether going down to Kobol was a good idea AFTER HAVING MADE THE FRAKKING JUMP. You've made your fucking bed, now fucking lie in it. Also irritating were the fifty bazillion reporters at the press conference, though I liked the continual presence of the hot reporter that Baltar frakked in a bathroom that one time. Less irritating, but still a little annoying, were the three thousand minutes spent assuring us that Adama's choice for CAG was a moron. I wouldn't have been surprised if Kat had bought it, but I was glad she didn't.

Everything else was kind of awesome, in an "Oh my God, these characters are ridiculously complex and everything they have gone through during the course of series is affecting all their actions" way.

Oh, because it was kind of disconnected from the rest of the episode, let me express my love for the Baltar/Six scene. We hadn't a good one in a while, really, and I loved Baltar's having a human/Cylon existential crisis. And oh man, see, this very night, during the intro ("The humans built the Cylons, etc."), I was thinking how much I loved that music. And they used it for the Baltar/Six scene! And it was so fucking perfect!

The return of the Capricans was handled very nicely. I mean, I don't know, I love how this show keeps making people do things you wish they wouldn't do, but you know they're doing the most logical thing given the information they have. It's perfectly natural to be suspicious of this vehicle that's not Starbuck's Raider, because they have no earthly idea what happened to her on Caprica. She goes in the Raider, comes back in the Raider. THAT WAS THE PLAN. And then when everyone's reunited, everyone's had a different experience. Apollo doesn't know what's up with Boomer. Helo doesn't know Roslin's president. Starbuck doesn't know Adama was shot. It's beautiful. And you're yelling at everyone to stop being such idiots, but you see, they haven't been watching the show! They don't know what's going on! That is crackerjack writing there, and not taking the easy way out.

Roslin? Fucking ruthless these days. Sending Boomer to the air-lock, threatening to kill Helo (made all the more ruthless by the fact that she doesn't even know him, so who knows how serious she was being). All in the name of The Mission. And she's looking rather haggard. Or maybe she just looks a lot older than she did when I caught her in Independence Day a few days ago.

I think I might like the Caprica scenes from the first season more now that I know that Helo/Boomer actually goes somewhere important. And Starbuck continues to flip-flop on her Cylon views. One second, she's all SHE'S A PERSON! and the next it's OKAY BYE ENJOY THE AIR-LOCK. People have harped on Grace Park's acting before, but I thought she was really good tonight. I really don't know why the Cylons are so familiar with the Pythian Prophecies (moreso than the humans themselves, it seems). It is kind of fishy, like maybe the Cylons went back in time and wrote the prophecies or something. Maybe Sahjhan's a Cylon!!

Are Apollo and Starbuck twelve? No, seriously, are they fucking twelve? "Can I have my ball back?" "You said you loved me, no takebacks!" (Okay, I mock, but I actually really liked that scene. Especially the framing where they were back-to-back but with the fence between them.) It's funny how they throw the 'shippers a bone with that kiss but then they just have them fight the rest of the episode. I didn't realize Apollo/Starbuck would turn out to be such a fucked-up relationship.

Ooh, Zarek and Myers. He does have his own agenda. Very cool. Have we seen Myers before? I can't remember him. I loved how their plan was very subtle, but then Myers went and ruined it with his "One person in particular!" Like, we got it, dude. Seriously. We're not stupid. You were doing a lovely job before.

I'm kind of loving the incomprehensibility of the malfunctioning Boomer model. Strega put it really well in her recap for last week's episode, in that Tyrol thinks he didn't love her because she was a machine, whereas Adama thinks that because Tyrol loved her, she couldn't be just a machine. And now, we have Roslin weighing in on this Boomer, who goes from being a thing to a young woman once she has valuable information, and remains so when she is convinced that Boomer feels some sort of love. Why, is it love that makes us human? This concept has never been explored before!! Except it probably has. But I don't care.

Elosha goes boom! That was some unexpectedly crappy CGI for the bombs, though. At least the Centurions still looked cool. And isn't it great that Helo's back? Because he's one of the few people there who's actually had experience fighting Centurions. And Boomer totally looked like she was making a run for it, even though I knew she wasn't, so I was on board with Apollo running after her. I just hoped he wouldn't shoot her before she got to do whatever she was planning to do, which was, you know, save their asses. Also, way to mourn Elosha and totally ignore the other guy who got ripped apart by bullets.

Finally, freaky scene with Adama and his model ship. Never guessed it was Dualla he was talking to. Go Dualla with the telling it like it is. I half expected Adama to be all, "I SAID GOOD DAY SIR!"

Aw, Adama's putting the fleet back together. He's putting the family back together. With the Glue of Hermes. The Toothpicks of Aphrodite.Current Mood:drainedCurrent Music: Gimble - Ana Ng

Comments:

Particularly in the Starbuck/Apollo scene, they got me so invested in that stupid pyramid ball. I couldn't help thinking "Apollo, quit screwing with that! It's symbolic of her crazy fling with a pro athlete resistance leader who rescued her from Cylon-Planned Parenthood!"

And yet Starbuck not only didn't go off on a rant about her experiences (because, really, who would open up on that stuff so quickly) but she even just gave in and let him mess with the ball. Not what I was expecting, but much more emotional and real, in my opinion.

Sadly next week everyone will probably know the whole story and we won't get such neat asymmetry of information. But it was fun for one episode.

Don't worry. If there's one thing Ron Moore loves to do with these characters, it's divide and conquer. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone else gets stranded/lost/runs off. I would bet that the expedition on Kobol will remain out of contact with the fleet for at least an episode or two.